Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost because her party ditched working class voters.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said in a fund-raising email that arrived in my inbox the day after the election. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Sanders wanted to know if “the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”
Leading Democrats have rebuked Sanders to one degree or another. They include White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison.
Sanders has repeated his J’accuse on TV and in print. But in a fund-raising email I got on Nov. 11, he included a copy of his Boston Herald op-ed in which he also went after the president-elect.
“Donald Trump won this election because he tapped into” working class anger while refusing to “address any of these serious issues in a thoughtful or meaningful way.” The senator added, “What he did do was divert the festering anger in our country at a greedy and out-of-touch corporate elite into a politics that served his political goals and will end up further enriching his fellow billionaires.”
I doubt anybody who got the Nov. 6 email thought Sanders, who caucuses with Senate Democrats, had defected to team Trump. Certainly, he considers his criticism of the Democrats not just valid but constructive. Yet, his message might have gotten a warmer reception from party bigwigs had he privately voiced his concerns with them. No political leader appreciates getting dressed down in public by an ally, especially after a crushing defeat at the polls.
“Respectfully disagree with the senator, and I think you can talk to unions, you can see the jobs that we have been able to create to disprove that.” Jean-Pierre replied to a reporter. “And he is a president that cares certainly about the people that do get forgotten, the people who are not able to make ends meet … and so does the vice president.”
According to The Hill’s Alex Gangitano, Jean-Pierre reminded reporters that “Biden has been called the most pro-union president” and said the president “has worked toward creating jobs that don’t need a college degree.”
Pelosi, who can be as frank as Sanders, told The New York Times she neither agreed with nor respected what he said.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Harrison slammed Sanders’s comments as “straight up BS ... Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time – saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs, and even marched in a picket line, and some of MVP’s [Madam Vice President’s] plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country. From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house, to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”
His post notched more than half a million “likes.”
My unscientific survey of social media platforms and online news story comment sections revealed that some rank-and-file party activists welcomed Sanders’s criticism. Yet others said he’s wrong; some suggested that, however unintentionally, Sanders helps Trump when he disses Democrats.
Western Kentucky activists Brian Clardy and Jennifer Smith say that by putting front-and-center his claim that the Democrats forsook the working class, Sanders is diverting attention from Trump’s authoritarianism and his constant pandering to racism, sexism, misogyny, nativism, xenophobia, LGBTQ baiting, and Christian nationalism.
“Let’s be honest, a nativist streak has always run through the body of American politics,” Clardy said. “And at the end of the day, the vast majority of white people who voted for Donald Trump just couldn’t vote for a woman of color. Period. Full-stop.”
Smith, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, was equally blunt, if not blunter. “This comes down to misogyny. Trump voters hated the woman more than they hated the rapist. We had outstanding women in 2016 and 2020, and whites voted as usual against having a woman as president.”
Smith lives in Paducah, but grew up in Vermont. “I love Bernie,” she said. “But he’s always had his own idea that he can burn down the house when he wants to. He can be a curmudgeon, a loveable curmudgeon. But right now he needs to sit down and shut up.”
Clardy and Smith are hardly alone in citing Trump’s hate speech.
He went “full racist (or “nativist,” as some outlets delicately describe it),” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote less than a month before election day. “... Regardless of his location, he invokes the specter of a non-White horde displacing Whites. Illegal immigrants are ‘evil,’ are ‘taking your jobs,’ and have ‘bad genes.’ Right-wing hosts, elected Republicans, and most down-ticket Republican candidates don’t blanch, let alone denounce racism unprecedented in modern American presidential elections. The mainstream media has begun to feature Trump’s racism (sometimes thinly disguised with fuzzy language) in headlines.”
I don’t know if Clardy and Smith are on any Trump “enemies list.” I suspect Rubin is.
“Trump has consistently evidenced racism throughout his career,” Rubin added. “He might have flipped on abortion, but racial animus seems baked into his psyche. Whether being sued for refusing to rent to African Americans, demonizing the innocent Central Park Five, promoting the “birther’ conspiracy theory to delegitimize the first Black president, announcing his entry into politics by slandering immigrants as murderers and thugs, refusing to denounce white nationalists at a debate in 2016, referring to non-White-majority countries as ’s__holes,’ or preemptively blaming Jews for his defeat, Trump has never departed from a steady stream of racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism. His exaggeration about crime in big cities is a racial dog whistle; his phony ‘immigrant crime wave’ is a racial bullhorn. This is who he is.”
Part of who Sanders is includes his longstanding claims that the Democrats have forsaken the working class.
“In the aftermath of last week’s presidential election, many have attributed the Democrats’ defeat to their inability and/or refusal to respect, speak to, care about, or prioritize the so-called ‘white working class’,” proposed Katie Grimes, a professor of theological ethics at Villanova University. “According to this view, the ‘white working class,’ like innocent children, have been ‘abandoned’ by party elites.”
Writing for womenintheology.org, she quoted a Sanders tweet: “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”
Grimes’s post and the tweet were published in November, 2016.
Grimes noted that Sanders came up short in the 2016 primary against Clinton mainly “because he got blown out among black voters, especially those in the country’s poorest region, the Deep South.”
Black voters powered Biden over Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Anyway, union members make up a big chunk of the working class. Evidence suggests that union households didn’t desert the Dems in droves. “In fact, union voters were one of the few groups that did not appreciably shift toward Trump and Republicans in what is shaping up to be one of the party’s strongest presidential election cycles in recent memory,” wrote Politico’s Nick Niedzwiadek.
I’m a retiree member of the American Federation of Teachers, one of 60 unions that belong to the 12.5-million strong AFL-CIO. The country’s largest labor organization doesn’t think Biden, Harri,s or the Democratic Party have deep-sixed the working class. The federation endorsed Biden, then switched its endorsement to Harris after Biden dropped out and recommended his vice president to succeed him.
“From day one, Vice President Kamala Harris has been a true partner in leading the most pro-labor administration in history,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler in announcing the Harris nod.
So it turned out that most union families knew Trump was the real foe of the working class and voted accordingly. (Click here, here, here and here.)
To be sure, our candidate lost some Latino and Black voters to Trump. But she still won majorities in both groups, if exit polls are right.
On the other hand, most whites, including working class whites, have voted Republican in every presidential contest since at least 1976, according to The Washington Post.
Here’s the bottom line. If The AFL-CIO, the country’s largest and most powerful labor organization, believed, like Sanders, that the Democrats have “abandoned working class people” why did the federation endorse Biden, then Harris? And why did a majority of union households reject Trump?
And who was it who said in a warmly received speech at the Democratic national convention, “We are laying the groundwork for Kamala Harris to become our next president” and “I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this [Democratic] agenda.”
It was Bernie Sanders. I wonder what he would have said had Harris won.
Sanders grew up working class in Brooklyn. My friend the late J.R. Gray grew up working class in western Kentucky. I’m pretty sure J.R. would challenge Sanders’s characterization of the Democratic Party. He had the creds to do it: He was a regional Machinists union official and a veteran Democratic state representative who was labor’s staunchest ally in Frankfort during his era. He was Kentucky secretary of labor after he left the House.
“History will tell you that the Democrats ramrodded every meaningful piece of legislation for the benefit of working people,” J.R. once told me.
That’s still true. In Congress, the Democrats (and Sanders) support the landmark Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and “every meaningful piece of legislation for the benefit of working people.” Few Republicans have ramrodded a pro-labor bill; none would today in Congress and very few would in state capitals, including Frankfort, where anti-labor GOP supermajorities hold sway in both Houses.
If the Republicans win the U.S. House, the union-buster Trump will have the trifecta he needs to enact Project 2025, which is, among other assaults on democracy, a declaration of war against organized labor.
Trump and the Republicans must love it when Sanders says the Democrats have deep-sixed their historic commitment to the working class. That is not his intention, far from it. But he needs to take care that his words don’t give Trump and the MAGA GOP cause to boast, “See, even socialist Sanders says the Democrats don’t care about hard working Americans.”
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